The Power of Myth

I can't stress enough the power of mythology, both in its magical ability to guide the efforts of an entire society, and in the energy and consideration a ruling class will put into it to facilitate their rule.

We have this massive economic, political, and social symbolic system that has come to completely disregard the underlying human (and ecological) reality. This is important to keep in mind anytime you are exposed to TV.

And of course, this has been going on some time. This is a power that can produce visions in its worshipers that completely obscure any semblance of truth. It is a power that can cause intelligence officials to believe destitute protesters - individuals made destitute by the very workings of the system both them and intelligence officials are a part of -  are some sort of nefarious outsider conspiracy. It was communists then, and it is terrorists now.

We used to see the cargo cult as a feature peculiar to less technologically advanced societies, but I think the phenomenon of the cargo cult is just one of the manifestations of the spectacular distortions that can occur when an ideology drifts far enough from its reality. Really, the cargo cult, in its essence, is something that happens all the time. Of course the interpretations of the phenomenon itself are changing all the time too. The Wikipedia entry has changed since I saw it last, and this new formulation reflects the changing nature of interpretation.

You can see the dramatic effects of mythology on the persons closest to the center of power. They take on a different quality altogether. You see it when you watch political, economic, and cultural elites, powerful peoples that have to conduct themselves in accordance with the strictures of power.

They take on a robotic appearance, both aesthetically and in personality. I've felt this robotic quality myself. It probably takes its characteristic from the superego, or somewhere in the region of the temporal lobe, whatever you want to call it. When I perceive that I am trying to align my behaviors with some desired ideal, or an ideal that simply allows one to persist as a "normal" person within established institutions, I find that my movements and thoughts become rigid, directed. What the rest of my body wishes to do, or what my emotions wish to do, are all suppressed, with all appropriate behaviors selected and directed by the executive.

The circle is squared. The rich canvas of the real is amputated under a defined shape. This works for a while to achieve certain functions, but reality always seeks to express itself wherever resistance is weakest.

Again, it is impossible to overstate how remarkable this is.

On The Origins of Capitalism

"The decisive point about the depressions of the [1860s] and [1870s], which initiated the era of imperialism, was that they forced the bourgeoisie to realize for the first time that the original sin of simple robbery, which centuries ago had made possible the 'original accumulation of capital' (Marx) and had started all further accumulation, had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of accumulation suddenly die down."

- Hannah Arendt

The origins of capitalism are often traced back to their agrarian birthplace in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Whereas the various growing kingdoms of continental Europe still had these weaker-but-centralizing monarchies that existed side by side with powerful oligarchic landlords, with these sort of traditional mercantilist economies, England had an even stronger central government that worked closely with an unusually powerful oligarchic group of landlords, who in turn held a vast proportion of the land. So most of the peasants were tenants that lived under these powerful oligarchs and were subjected to intense pressures to increase productivity. Tenancy became tied to a single centralized market: landlords could post rents to occupy a certain patch of land, and peasants had to compete vigorously for those tenancies lest they become landless. Production itself became increasingly unmoored from survival or even the administration of a regular society, becoming a competition, a means to power. This process was accelerated by the enclosures of the 16th and 18th centuries; the peasants were forced off of the land, which forced them to be utterly dependent on the landlords, and thus, the market, for their very survival.

Accumulation and competitive expansion became a dominating national, and eventually international ethos. This process was intensified by almost literally lighting a fire underneath the productive classes. They no longer could secure their own subsistence by working the land. They depended on landlords, and thus markets that were constantly expanding. These are supposedly the initial conditions that gave birth to the motor of capitalist accumulation. 

Now the article linked provides a narrative for this birth, but it is somewhat unclear about the exact causal relationships within this process, so more digging will be necessary. But let's try a little early speculation.

Why does capitalism possess the characteristics it has? Does a centralized capitalist market have to expand into every aspect of people's lives? Does it have to expand beyond the borders of its originating nation? Is the endless accumulation associated with capitalism a result of structural peculiarities with the system, or a consequence of strong psychological motivations possessed by participants in the system, or maybe a little bit of both?

Consider the dynamics of competitive growth: a large body seems to need to grow to sustain itself. Why is this? Let's think about the social psychology for a minute, though this is might not be entirely adequate of an explanation. It seems like large things themselves give birth to strong competitive pressures due to structural stresses involved. Egalitarian societies are more manageable the smaller they are. Within smaller groups, each member of the group has a chance to be powerful - at least relatively speaking - as individuals can be both dominant and submissive within more intimate settings. Plus there is less pressure. There is not a large set of observers judging on any individual's power.

However the larger a society grows, the more hierarchical and controlled it has to become in order to move in any given direction, in order to be responsive to its environment. Otherwise there are simply too many interests proceeding in too many directions for anything to get done. Where there are hierarchies, there are leaders, and individuals generally perceived to be in higher esteem, or in higher power. For the ambitious, there is a pressure to ascend to such positions. Plus, there is a greater amount of observers judging these powerful positions that are more socially exposed. There becomes an imperative to maintain an air of dominance, lest one fall in power.

Power absorbs lesser power to grow, which antagonizes lesser power, but lesser power must be absorbed if it cannot fight back. Everyone is growing in power, and so for security, everyone needs to keep growing lest someone fall behind and be subjugated or destroyed. There is a tremendous pressure to grow in power. Everyone knows everyone else is going for it all. There is a mutual fear and distrust of one another among the power climbers.

As everyone grows in power, there is more taken away from everyone else. Everyone wants to climb everyone and everyone treats each other - and especially the powerless - like shit, so there is this exponential growth of antipathy and trauma, coarsening the most and least powerful alike, though some find empathy.

So during the course of this process, everyone becomes alienated to one another and everyone becomes jaded and apathetic to genuine human connection, out of defense.This leads to a greater pursuit of power. There is nothing else to enjoy. There is nothing else that generates meaning.

Within a delimited body, power reaches its limits when it can no longer grow fast enough, and there is not enough energy to absorb. If power cannot grow anymore, it has to begin feeding on the national body itself, absorbing more and more power from the less powerful, until social, political, and economic instabilities reach a certain threshold and there is a crash. With such polarities, there are antagonisms throughout the body. There is infighting between great powers, and fighting between the actual classes. There is a great antipathy between great power and lesser power. However this is also a matter of proportion. There is a portion of power which is sympathetic to the powerless, and a portion of the powerless sympathetic to power, and so on all along the spectrum of power. Nevertheless, these polarities, as stated above, necessarily lead to antagonisms which grow as the polarities grow.

To maintain stability, constant growth is required. Everyone needs to be gaining power. To avoid total collapse within this delimited body, power seeks outside power to absorb, hence imperialism. This process creates an even greater delimited body, which is to collapse upon reaching total limits.

So what exactly is capitalism? It is hard to get a precise handle on it. The system is characterized by private ownership of the means of production, and is driven by the profit motive, the overarching impulse to use wealth to get more wealth. However as a theory it is hard to define. Theoretical concepts never translate completely in the material world, and the system, as birthed out of theory, changes in time due to the necessities of maintaining it. Capitalism as a theory seemed to be birthed out of this egalitarian vision of self-interested actors interacting in the market as equals. However the theory when put into practice was completely skewed towards the powerful.

Behind the historical arc of capitalism is a tendency towards expansion and the acquisition of power through competition and domination, which is a tendency that is shared by more ancient structures. Capitalism sees profit begetting profit, but really profit is a proxy for power. Other societies have seen the power begetting power dynamic. There are other ancient structures in history that grew to their limits and collapsed, and were characterized by similar impulses.

Capitalism seems to have to reinvent itself after almost collapsing every 50 years or even less. However other systems have seen this too. Take the divine right of kings concept that emerged after the Protestant Reformation which was an attempt to solve the endless factional strife in the old monarchies. And then the attempt by monarchies to adopt parliamentary governments until revolutions around the world virtually abolished monarchies in the major nations. Or further back, take the Roman acquisition of Greek mythology and then the eventual implementation of Christian ideology. It seems these ancient power structures reinvented themselves too, frequently even.

Nevertheless, capitalism is unique due to its scope and material power. It is an entirely new set of social relations as well, one that really hasn't been around for a long time. Due to intense expansionary pressures and powerful technologies, capitalism has become a truly global power structure, which has never really happened in history until now.

At the end of an era, it seems a ruling ideology goes bad, and there is this necessity of regressing to the original trauma. The more you think about regressing, following the causal chains back to their origin, the further back they go, on into infinity. It is hard to think this way if you are attempting a solution; the exercise becomes absurd, so a limited construct, a new ideology is generated, which describes in delineated and intelligible terms what has gone wrong and what needs to be done. Ideologies do work, but they expire, often very quickly.

The abstract and limited quality of ideology allows it to be hijacked. Ideology is exposed to conflicting interpretations, and oftentimes the interpretation of the most powerful becomes the established form, guiding the direction of future progress.

Expansion generates its own ideology, while contraction and collapse generates its ideological antithesis. Ideology is an expression of an age, a state, a widespread way in which individuals relate to each other, to the environment, and ultimately to the cosmos.

There is a chilling phenomenon that occurs throughout history: there are these egalitarian awakenings, which upon being birthed in a time of great corruption and perversion of power, are themselves subverted by the power-hungry. The hunger for power introduces an antagonizing logic which disrupts stability, forcing a new process of expansion. What's more, this new power utilizes the egalitarian ideology to make stable the new growing empire, making it more powerful in turn.

Like addicts, the power-hungry permeate the social fabric. It seems it is a problem peculiar to apex predators. A powerful group grows to dominate and the accumulation of power becomes an end in itself, whose logic leads inexorably to a population collapse.

I'm not so sure this has to be a necessary condition of our social nature, but it is a problem whose complex roots extend far into history, resulting in powerful social forces that are difficult to reverse. Successful expansion leads to a power struggle, the peak of which generates the power-starved, who in turn possess the relentless drive to accumulate compensatory power, which in turn drives a new expansionary process. And the cycle repeats, and repeats, and repeats.

Upon witnessing these power-hungry Western powers, indigenous groups in the Americas remarked that what they were seeing were profoundly sick societies. These societies were predicated on the machinations of the mentally ill; they spread a virus in which their constituents sucked the life force out of other people, and themselves. From where does it come? And is it necessary?

Male/Female

One curious thread that runs throughout the history of Western civilization is the systematic suppression of the feminine and the amplification of the masculine.

I'm not sure that this quality has to be essential to a civilization. I suppose we have to think about the actual definition - and nature - of what a civilization is, what we want it to be. 

But it is a quality that is common to many of the great civilizations in the short time frame of agrarian and industrial human history. The great civilizations become empires; they become empires because they harden around a certain delimited and defining idea with expansionary and progressive properties, expanding outward and dominating weaker - or more peaceful - heterogeneous societies.  

The very structural basis of such an entity is of a masculine nature. Thus the corollary of its amplification is the suppression of the feminine. Is it necessary?

In the Morning/Fear of Yuppies

It is 4:20. Not in the evening but in the morning; not a good time to smoke, perhaps.

Someone is outside digging through the trash. Supposedly this early so as not to be seen. Out of prudence? I think it is illegal in Long Beach. Out of dignity?

What are we doing?

A Flash in the Dark

Suddenly my dreams shifted into a nightmarish cascade of mad images and impressions and I was soon greeted with a horrific image: the darkness was illuminated but within were endless processions of spindly insects crawling in lines, all in a single direction towards some point off in the distance.

My mind fought. It attempted to climb its way recursively backwards, attempting to assemble a narrative while I still dreamed. What did it all mean? A vague story presented itself broken, an oscillating tremolo of mere glimpses, as if I had to squint to peer through the cracks of a fence to grasp some truth: of order and light coalescing out of some vast black madness. Of disgust and despair birthed out of some great thrill.

I awoke sick, reeling. My mind was still attempting to produce a pattern, passing over and over a thought that couldn't be articulated like a broken ratchet. What did it mean? Was it something in the water? Something I ate? Was I thinking too much? Bitten? Poisoned? But it could be anything. It could be nothing.

The logical mind is ultimately a compression machine, an organ that assembles intelligible order out of a vast, infinite, unknowable canvas. It proceeds in a linear fashion from a single thread to produce a contour for navigating with. But there was no answer because the threads were all going in too many directions. I had to let it all go lest I be dragged down with it.

The Veil Lifts 2: On US Power (And Coming to Terms With It)

The inspiration for this post lies partly in celebrating the spirit of the Olympics!

A courageous female ex Olympic luge athlete has compared the Olympics to the Hunger Games. Interesting!

The curious thing about that article is that when I searched for it to link to in the post, a few other outlets came up first with articles of their own bearing similar headlines: ABC News, E! News, MSNBC News, etc. All very crass, corporate outlets. Of course it was no surprise these subsequent articles carried none of the substance or the menacing air of the original article, but chose instead to focus on various frivolities such as surface impressions of the ceremony and athlete uniform and appearance and things like that.

There could of course be several reasons for this, perhaps not mutually exclusive reasons either.  The editors could be taking advantage of the sudden spate of interest in the underlying nature of the Olympics. The comparison itself happened to be very timely: both the Olympics and The Hunger Games are wildly popular in the cultural mainstream, and would surely attract readers. Maybe the owners of these outlets - who all have a stake in the cultural power of the Olympics, seeing as how the event itself has become the epicenter of a particularly vigorous marketing storm - worried about the deflationary nature of the original article and its critical position on the Olympics. Maybe it was a chance to get a nice little jab in at Russia - who is actually a destructive world power as well, but who is perceived as competing (however weakly) with the US for global economic power.

Finally, it could just be that the structural nature of the real and fictional events really do resemble each other: the opening ceremonies happened to look aesthetically similar, and there is a similar, though unacknowledged social hierarchy involved. One of the outlets wrote it up and the editors saw the article as an opportunity so the rest just picked up the story.

As a professional SEO writer, and having worked briefly for a startup online media outlet, I can see several of these possibilities being plausible. Maybe even several of them are working together. These people know what they are doing.

But the combination of the negative article linked, and the bubbly frivolous articles discussed has reminded me of how much energy and resources go into maintaining the ideological mythology of US empire and the global capitalist project in general.

There is an article out every week or so that exposes the corrupting effects of global capital - behind which is the driving influence of US power - on literally every social pursuit held sacred by the populace. Capital needs such sacred events; their vitality draws people in and converts ever more into paying customers. But the closer capital embraces the sacred, the more total the ultimate corruption of the sacred, which is due in large part to the defining logical drive of capital: to beget more of itself. It is a drive that results not just in the corruption of the sacred, but the disintegration and degradation of communities and life support systems themselves. That is, everything from quality of living, quality of tools, food, water, human happiness, dignity, honor - everything - is subordinated to the profit imperative, so that we are left with a society in which the vast spectrum of human interaction is reduced to a never-ending process of exploitation.

Through the corrupting effects of endless exploitation, any sort of communal or even national center is dissolved. The resulting dissolution leaves a society of atomized individuals forced to compete among themselves for power that is steadily redistributed upwards, so that the whole sum of social relations bends in the direction of the desires of the economic elite, or the corporations that are controlled by them, which grow steadily more powerful.

Such a process has been going on for a very long time. And such a process produces its share of discontents, which necessitates a vigorous project of ideological maintenance, of the careful preservation of the myth of US empire as a great, benevolent, just force.

The power of this myth-building project is evident in my own daily experience.  My mind is blown repeatedly throughout the week. Each new revelation about US empire, both past and present, leaves me in shock. Everything I learned in elementary school, high school, even college, did not prepare me for the things I have learned in the last couple of years. And I continue to be surprised! The link above is especially remarkable. A collection of remarkable documents and observations.

Of course, the US empire is a great civilization. One of the greatest in history. But then, this statement hinges on what is meant by great. What I mean by great is simply powerful. Over the course of history, there have been courageous detractors and dissidents, even people within the system that were nauseated by the raw exercise of power, and fought against it. And there is a nearly endless procession of innovations and artistic and intellectual works that were produced within empire's bounds. But the general arc, the general direction of material progress, especially today, has been towards more power, control or domination, and wealth.

Such a concentration of material and ideological power necessarily implies its opposite: chaos and powerlessness. For every vacuum nature detests, there is an overextended structure, or mass of organized matter, that nature detests equally. Where does that leave us?

I am left with a minor problem. Coupled with a finer spiritual understanding, thanks to my recent delving into Buddhist and Taoist thought (once again), this obsession surrounding the negative, or bad positive, to be terminologically precise, starts to look absurd. If everything that is happening now is happening exactly as it should, and that everything in the future will proceed exactly as it should, and that the best thing one can do for oneself is to accept everything as it is and live in the current moment, which is essentially eternity, why pay any attention to the bad positive at all?

Well because the bad positive is inseparable from this eternity one can revel in. Because the bad positive by necessity implies the good negative, and all the energy that goes with it. As one gazes into the eye of the bad positive, the towering, multiplying, destabilizing cruelty that is the capitalist process, one confronts it in all its horror, experiencing a deep existential terror.

But this terror presents something to be overcome. One wants above all to live, not to curl up into a ball trembling and shrinking from life. So what is to be done? Well, again, implied within this bad positive - this defined structure extended out into reality that has become corrupt - is a good negative, or a constellation of values that stands in contrast to old values that have gone bad. We are faced with radical egotism and individualism, so we answer back wtih collectivism. We are faced with atomization, so we answer back with community. We are faced with the profit motive, so we answer back with generosity and charity. And so on. All of the pain one feels upon the apprehension of the state of things is eventually transformed into the sublime, and so the ideological good negative (in apprehension to the bad positive) in one's mind stands as a potential to be transformed into the kinetic. Suffering is sublimated into vigor and from the good negative is birthed a new good positive, an erupting energy, a will to life.

But one has to take care not to become too attached to this good negative (and the subsequent good positive) for two reasons, one short term and one long term. In the short term, if one becomes too attached to this good negative, one can fall into despair upon being surrounded by the bad positive, diminishing one's ability to bring about the good positive (yes all of these polarized terms are awful and confusing I know). Secondly, if one attaches too much to the subsequent good positive, one runs the risk of it becoming a bad positive when the ideology itself has outlasted the reality it is trying to actualize, which is happening with capitalism today. Combining various insights of Eastern philosophies with whatever other philosophies and practices one utilizes can help with this.

A common misconception about Buddhism is that its doctrine of ontological emptiness collapses into nihilism. If ego and material struggle are an illusion and the ideology surrounding them is a fabrication, why do anything at all? Or why not do everything one wants? But Buddhism logically proceeds to the opposite of nihilism: it is a doctrine for living.

The beauty of Eastern spiritual philosophy in general is that you can decouple it from its origin and combine it with whatever discipline you wish. You can do this with the Abrahamic religions too, but it takes a little more digging and decoding. The doctrines of disciplines like Buddhism and Taoism are very abstract and not as judgmental. More relational and less particular. More relative and less absolute. So you have these monk figures with their practices in their monasteries that sort of represent a distilled form of this philosophy, but you can apply the doctrine itself to everything you do, because of how flexible and dynamic it is. This is why you sometimes hear Buddhism referred to as a religion of no religion.

So with a cosmic understanding, you can continue on as a scientist, philosopher, artist, political activist, whatever, with a more nuanced understanding of the way the universe works. Human symbolic navigation systems, or ideologies, are very useful for navigating the practical world. But over time, ideologies reference themselves to make themselves more efficient and effective. This is useful to an extent, until they become so self-referential that they are no longer in communication with reality, where the whole point of them is to understand reality. And so spiritual practice frees up this bottleneck, clearing the ideological board, so that one can observe and commune with reality with clarity.

Religious Counterthrust

When I've had too much, when my thoughts race out of control and I grow dizzy and nauseous, I find myself gravitating back to mysticism, or religious writing, though "religion" is a pretty heavily loaded term these days. It calms me. It sets me back.

One thing you notice after studying mysticism is that many of the great mystic disciplines have a preoccupation with "too much." Many of the writings, doctrines, practices, etc. have a lot to do with returning to a calm after too much pleasure seeking, too much wealth, too much ego, too much thinking, too much dogma, and so on. The wisest mystics don't hold these things in contempt in themselves: pleasure, ego, wealth, thinking, etc. But they do set themselves against too much of these things in a relative sense, though they tend to be wary of partaking in them anyways, because they understand their allure and their tendency to induce more - excepting perhaps thinking; more thinking is okay, but again not too much.

There is a great respect surrounding balance. It is ironic that organized religion itself sort of tends back to this state of too much structurally, though it retains the old symbols, but that is besides the point.

There is something curious that happens sonically with digital delay. Digital delay basically repeats an inputed signal in accordance with various parameters, creating an echo. If you turn up the decay and the feedback of the sound and everything, the signals wash back onto each other and for a while it sounds nice...a wall of sound. But after a while it grows tiresome, and even maddening if you have the right recurring patterns. It seems this is something similar metaphorically to what happens in life systems. There is this tendency towards blind progress in every direction, and upon finding its natural limits, washes back onto itself, as a sort of hall of mirrors, until the intervals grow to a point where there is a vast blindness and a breakdown of communication and intelligibility.

It seems a lot of different kinds of religions are a response to this phenomena. A counterthrust. A reset switch that allows one to begin again with the clarity to proceed.

A Useful Reminder (More Than Useful)

One has to necessarily partake in the world; one is alive. One acts and one is acted upon. Within the totality of such an experience is hope, joy, anger, fear, disappointment, triumph, all of it.

But beyond that is the fundamental nature of things. And it is worth understanding viscerally this "suchness," and to constantly pursue this understanding as background to all experiences, so as to ultimately embrace those experiences.

It doesn't take long. Here is a short exercise, courtesy of a friend. I've already watched it three times in a row. I like to remind myself.

Airport Chaos Pt. 3

To be perfectly clear, this series is intended not as a complaint, but a straight observation. Much of the service that is suffering the most is still privilege by world standards, privilege that I'm not altogether comfortable with considering the cost to peoples remote to my own sphere of experience.

But a large part of the social contract that capital makes with its lower class constituents is that in return for your own means of self-subsistence, your right to the land, and your ultimate autonomy, you get a vast array of material pleasures and experiences to choose from.

With your labor power you receive a wage, and with that wage you get to enter into a universal market that gives you the freedom to choose the kind of life you want to make, provided you accumulate the appropriate amount of wealth to do so. This allure of material freedom contributes in a substantial way to the overall legitimacy of the capitalist system.

Sell your soul, but you get to be comfortable and pursue a huge variety of pleasures, provided you don't think too much of the surrounding populations extracted from and eventually pulverized to provide a platform for such a market of pleasures. And then many people don't even get to choose. They are born into the system and the system is all they know. Or the system is the only way to survive, which is true to a large extent for many people.

But capital now fails regularly to uphold its end of the contract, leaving a global populace to struggle amongst themselves to simply subsist. You enter the market to simply survive, but what has flooded the market are inferior products and faulty services. This is especially the case for the poor, but the middle class has increasingly experienced this change in various ways.

As I've tried to articulate, this is due to many interacting forces of varying natures: economic, environmental, and political. However sometimes a little storytelling is more helpful.

The Tower of Babel myth is originally known as a sort of biblical morality tale and an etiology of multiple languages. The myth has it that a society with a unified language looked to build a tower that would reach the heavens so that they could become immortal as a monolithic culture, lest they be scattered to the corners of the earth. As religious morality, the myth teaches the lesson that if man seeks to become god, he is certain to fail. In response to man's hubris, god fragmented the language of this society so that they could not understand each other, and eventually they abandoned the tower and the city. Understood as etiology, the myth provides a primitive explanation for the birth of multiple languages. But there is another way to interpret it.

The myth was possibly birthed from the experience of slaves in Babylon, who experienced the towering ziggurats built by hubristic Babylonian rulers, and it has since passed through several phases of interpretation. Like all myths, the Tower of Babel myth has been re-interpreted throughout history to satisfy the sensibilities of whatever ideology is doing the interpreting. To interpreters, there is something in the myth which helps to explain the world they are experiencing.  Bruegel likened the tower to the Roman Colosseum in a wonderful work of art that demands a sustained gaze. Like Babylon before it, Rome experienced a similar trajectory of rise and fall, accompanied by a corresponding procession of ideologies justifying any given state within the trajectory.

These ancient thinkers were trying to make sense of something very complex and profound that was happening to their societies. It is reasonable to suspect that what they were experiencing was something that happens to every civilization across time, and that they were doing the best they could to conceptualize it in language and imagery, providing us with important information.

And so, with any monolithic concentration of power and the related material endeavors it engages in, there must be a corresponding decline in which energy is dispersed, communication is fragmented, and power is scattered.

Yeats noted beautifully in The Second Coming - which has permeated the collective imagination of the political underground yet again - the subjective quality of this experience, which arguably saw its birth in the two world wars:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


The imminent fall of global capital (or global empire) has both negative and positive implications. The system itself serves as life support for at least a billion people or more. However a vast proportion of the global populace lives a degraded life in order to sustain a system that mostly benefits only a minority of the population. It is more probable that a complete collapse would only increase violence and uncertainty, but how long can such a system continue to go on? How long should it go on?

A calcified regime of power suppresses creativity, so its disintegration would mean creative expansion in every direction imaginable. However the loss in material benefits and energy (since global capital maintains a monopoly on both) could mean the forgoing of many creative avenues. But it bears considering the consequences of an unfettered capitalist engine running its course to certain ecological devastation.

The exact trajectory we will take remains unclear, but there are several avenues that remain promising. Decentralization is going to be a necessity and it is already happening to a certain extent of its own accord. A return to self-sufficiency is also essential, considering the slow unraveling of a largely centralized food production system. Capital originally derived its power through the loss of human connection to the land. Freud would urge us to regress to the initial point of trauma, and he would be right.

Human power will be the primary engine of production, so it would follow that human beings will have to learn to co-exist and cooperate again, without suspending themselves within isolated housing, transportation, and media.

All these things will be very difficult. It is nearly impossible to acquire land today, especially if you are young and poor. It is also very difficult to escape the comfortable habits gained while living within capital's embrace. It will be a long, slow process, driven by the imperatives of necessity.

Airport Chaos Pt. 2

At its base, this is an attempt to articulate something largely ineffable, an impression of social texture and quality. A feeling that one gets from being immersed in something that one can't quite get far enough outside of to see in its entirety.

Now, I've lived in California all my life. I've spent some time in places like Montana, Colorado, and Idaho and I've seen my share of severe weather, but I haven't traveled extensively enough to see the behavior of multiple authorities in different contexts of extreme weather or generally stressed conditions. And it becomes very difficult speaking precisely about broad social and economic patterns, as the further you zoom out, the more complex a body of phenomena is that you are trying to understand, coupled with the passage of time.

Sort of like trying to predict the weather. We call weather systems chaotic because of how incredibly complex they are, and how dramatically they are affected by so many different factors. If you isolate each factor, you can study it with some confidence and get some good data out of it, but the further you zoom out, the more difficult things become, and the more watery and loose our explanations become, which is OK. One can get a general idea of how a weather system works and make pretty decent predictions about that system, provided with a healthy tolerance of ambiguities and possible error.

With social, political, and economic phenomena, you can compare differing subjective experiences across time, as well as anecdotal data from other people, and then extrapolate from there with information taken from news media, history, philosophy, the sciences, and etc. With those disclaimers out of the way, I can continue about this general feeling taken from observation.

I found my experience at the airport to be very curious, especially coupled with the general trends I know about the world today. The snowstorm that nearly shut down the airport was not that severe, and I personally was not inconvenienced nearly as much as plenty of other travelers I've heard about in similar situations for perhaps the last 20 years. Nevertheless, there were some disconcerting things to take note of, one of them being the haphazard quality of service and disconnectedness of authorities in the airline company that ran the terminal I was stuck in.

I was amazed that I was able to get out of there, because there was a mass confusion and disorganization that seemed uncharacteristic for such a large, sophisticated airport.

An older, more experienced friend of mine noted that there's always been a quality of haphazardness in travel services, or really any service, which I can abide by. But with a larger company or agency there should emerge a certain regularity of service: theoretically this company has gotten as large and powerful as it has because it has systematized its travel procedures with a degree of competency - though there are often other reasons for this, such as political connectedness and luck. And as a general principle, a centralized authority has increased power to regulate its constituents to behave along certain guidelines.

But there is also a tension between increased centralization and the flexibility required for local services to respond to their own issues. Our larger companies repeatedly fail this balance, including the airline that was running the terminal. If you've ever worked in retail, you can experience this right away. The executive department issues rigid, generalized guidelines that are pretty much impossible to follow on the ground, and so employees basically try their best to do what they can with what they know, independent of but still attempting to adhere to the guidelines.

On a social level there is increased pressure on the individual workers. If someone experiences poor service, it is because this worker hasn't been courteous or deliberate enough and that if this bad worker is simply disciplined or replaced, everything will function smoothly. Attention has been shifted away from the underlying structures of corporate entities and their relations with greater society.

In the few workplaces I've had the pleasure to experience, there was a profound experience of fragmentation and apathy. Workers, upon being socialized into a given working environment, lose the expectation of affecting change or implementing their ideas, so they lose interest and do the bare minimum to keep things functioning. Or you have those power climbers that play political power games to get into higher positions so they can secure more control for themselves. The daily tasks have less to do with accomplishing anything meaningful, and more to do with either securing naked power or getting by effectively enough to put one's energies into outside pursuits. So what's happening everywhere else?

Perhaps we can cut the airline slack for the sudden bout of extreme weather. But the weather was not that extreme. We aren't talking about white-out conditions, just steady snow-fall. This airport is in the middle of Salt Lake City. The place gets snow. This airport is a national hub and it is very important that it function smoothly, so why not be prepared? Take a look at the baffling complexity of a modern airplane design. Incredible machines! But we can't keep snow off of a runway?  This isn't an isolated incident either. And these patterns show up in both corporate and government entities.

During the holiday season, there were all sorts of reports of shipping giants like Amazon failing to fulfill large portions of their orders, due to either weather or unexpected surges in demand. Or you have cruise lines breaking down in various places for strange reasons. Or consider the responses to a long string of increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters. The world was shocked at the US handling of New Orleans after Katrina, but since then, reactions have become increasingly numb.

How about Afghanistan? Iraq? Or numerous other locales across the world: increasing instability, and the inability of empire to cope.

Try dealing with any telecom company today. Doing even the most simple things can take hours of frustrating wrangling.

Consider the fiasco surrounding healthcare.org. I waited for the chaos to die down and tried applying for health care myself, and ended up being pinballed across several different departments who all had different ideas of what I was supposed to do.

And then I've seen economic writers speak all the time about economic devolution, of the decreasing quality of manufactured products over time, due to several processes which can ultimately be traced to simple greed: cost-cutting and implementation of cheaper materials, outsourcing of manufacturing processes, and of course, planned obsolescence, about which a recent documentary came out which I eventually plan to see. Don't get me wrong, there are still great innovations that see the light of day, but it seems as though these things aren't made to last long.

It is all very strange. All of this seems to contradict this classic Enlightenment idea of the rational man mastering the universe, and what's more, the classic bourgeois idea of the self-interested man facilitating this mastery. One of the central thrusts of ideological capitalism was that these silly state-socialist  or state-communist regimes (the biggest of which being the Soviet Union) were doomed to fail, since upon attempting to control the natural commercial activities of man (which really aren't that natural if you look at the history), they strangled the self-organizing powers of the free market by short-circuiting essential price signals that are emitted by the self-interested man acting in the market.

Boosters of capitalism pointed to organizational problems and commodity shortages, among other things, as evidence of the failure of centralized planning. Now, this is partially true: markets are much better than the state at handling certain informational problems, such as how to distribute goods across a population, though they are terrible at handling necessities and natural monopolies such as energy.

But now we see similar problems creeping into our own neoliberal "free market" economies. This could be partially due to over-centralization, but the over-centralization in this case has to do with large economic entities, which are growing ever larger with more and more mergers every day. This is exactly what was happening in the early 1900s robber baron era: huge monopolies were forming, which were creating all sorts of socio-political and economic distortions.

There is an overriding drive to squeeze more profit out of an already contracting populace, a populace that is contracting partially because of the diversion of energy to concentrated and voracious economic entities. Accounting for a contracting populace requires cost cutting, layoffs, and a squeezing of the productive capacities of staff kept on the job. The people that still have jobs are overworked and strained, barely able to fulfill any given task when there are so many. This is a self-perpetuating problem: as more is extracted from a populace, the populace has less to give, necessitating increased efforts to extract at previous levels but with less energy, which continues to cause contraction.

Extreme weather events catch authorities off guard, who maintain bare bones staff and equipment which is often ill-equipped for these events. And then thinly staffed companies - which keep lean departments to account for weak economic activity - are overwhelmed with sudden spikes in activity such as with holiday shopping.

The repeated failures of companies in every industry to deliver decent service and products, and the frequent failures to account for extreme conditions betrays not just an increasing fragility in rigid and top-heavy political and economic institutions, but an increasing instability in the environment and the economic activities of the populace itself.

There is a descending air of impotence and inefficacy. A resistance, an inability to pursue one's needs and desires. This is a sensation of the dropping away of centralized security, of the ability of a society to collectively regulate its own functions, with the resulting social experience of atomization and recklessness. It is something that no one wants to talk about, but everyone knows its there.

I know I'm becoming a bit of a broken record at this point, so in the final part I'd like to bring attention to an old myth that might be illuminating - or further obfuscating perhaps - as well as some thoughts for an appropriate future trajectory.